When Your Pants Begin to Go
When you wear a cloudy collar and a shirt that isn’t white, And you cannot sleep for thinking how you’ll reach to-morrow night, You may be a man of sorrows, and on speaking terms
Knocked Up
I’m lyin’ on the barren ground that’s baked and cracked with drought, And dunno if my legs or back or heart is most wore out; I’ve got no spirits left to rise and smooth
Ben Duggan
Jack Denver died on Talbragar when Christmas Eve began, And there was sorrow round the place, for Denver was a man; Jack Denver’s wife bowed down her head her daughter’s grief was wild, And
The Heart of Australia
When the wars of the world seemed ended, and silent the distant drum, Ten years ago in Australia, I wrote of a war to come: And I pictured Australians fighting as their fathers fought
Fall In, My Men, Fall In
The short hour’s halt is ended, The red gone from the west, The broken wheel is mended, And the dead men laid to rest. Three days have we retreated The brave old Curse-and-Grin –
The Wander-Light
And they heard the tent-poles clatter, And the fly in twain was torn – ‘Tis the soiled rag of a tatter Of the tent where I was born. And what matters it, I wonder?
Above Eurunderee
There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not, On the desolate flats where gaunt appletrees rot. Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze From his dark lonely gullies of
The Men We Might Have Been
When God’s wrath-cloud is o’er me, Affrighting heart and mind; When days seem dark before me, And days seem black behind; Those friends who think they know me Who deem their insight keen They
From the Bush
The Channel fog has lifted – And see where we have come! Round all the world we’ve drifted, A hundred years from “home”. The fields our parents longed for – Ah! we shall ne’er
In the Storm that is to come
By our place in the midst of the furthest seas we were fated to stand alone – When the nations fly at each other’s throats let Australia look to her own; Let her spend
The Song of the Darling River
The skies are brass and the plains are bare, Death and ruin are everywhere And all that is left of the last year’s flood Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud; The salt-springs
If you fancy that your people came of better stock than mine
If you fancy that your people came of better stock than mine, If you hint of higher breeding by a word or by a sign, If you’re proud because of fortune or the clever
Sez You
When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet, And across the distant timber you can SEE the flowing heat; When your head is hot and aching, and the shadeless plain is
The Teams
A cloud of dust on the long white road, And the teams go creeping on Inch by inch with the weary load; And by the power of the green-hide goad The distant goal is
The Blue Mountains
Above the ashes straight and tall, Through ferns with moisture dripping, I climb beneath the sandstone wall, My feet on mosses slipping. Like ramparts round the valley’s edge The tinted cliffs are standing, With